The Importance of Understanding Voldemort-Money
If you are familiar with Harry Potter, then you are familiar with He Who Must Not be Named, the supervillain who called himself Lord Voldemort, proclaiming it was: “…a name I knew wizards everywhere would one day fear to speak, when I had become the greatest sorcerer in the world!”
(If you have not joined the global millions who’ve been charmed by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it’s okay. Here is a quick overview. It matters to the money metaphor that will follow.)
In order to become the greatest super sorcerer in the world, Voldemort had to do away with a baby wizard named Harry Potter, for this baby had been prophesied to one day destroy him.
Voldemort’s Killing Curse, of course, backfired as baby Harry was protected by the pure love and sacrifice of his mother. The Killing Curse rebounded and destroyed Voldemort’s body. But the evil wizard planned to live forever, and had prepared for his own destruction by making horcruxes, a magical charm to keep the soul tethered to the material world. Thus, scattered shards of Voldemort’s soul continued to exist, attached to Harry and a few other special objects. The largest fragment of Lord Voldemort’s soul apparently was left drifting in the ether, free-as-a-loitering-teen to create mischief and pursue malevolence.
But You Know Who didn’t want to just keep his soul alive in a menagerie of memorabilia. He wanted to grow, and rise again to be the greatest sorcerer in the world, the one that all wizards would fear. So he found the rats and the cowards who would feed him with a combination of unicorn blood and snake venom.
Everyone knows it is a curse to kill unicorns.
“…it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn. Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something so pure and defenseless to save yourself and you will have but a half life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.” ~Firenze, the wise centaur.
The Muggle Struggle
Muggles are the regular folks, the non-wizards and non-witches. Caught up in the hustle bustle busy body ways of living in a dog eat dog world, where the only certainties are death and taxes, we are the Muggles. We Muggles are stressed out taxpayers and wage-earners with puny lives, spending a lifetime paying for a house and investing our hopes in our children (and usually ruining them in one way or another).
Never enough time and never enough money, our scarce Muggle bandwidth forces focused attention away from higher-order thinking and on to what is immediately needed: money (Shafir & Mullainathan, 2013). Struggling beneath the cognitive deficits of survival-mode, the Muggle tends to impart a falsely heightened sense of emotion, meaning, and purpose into the pursuit of money.
In a self-perpetuating cycle of scarcity and meaninglessness, the Muggle struggle is part of what allows money to be the most powerful talisman in the world.
The Perfect Horcrux
Fearful of magic and all things that cannot be explained by reductionist logic, Muggles remain ignorant of Voldemort and the power he wields upon their destinies. Muggles borrow, trade, and hoard, without realizing their lives depend upon the most ingenious horcrux of all: money, Voldemort-money.
Magical Facets (or Flaws) of Voldemort-Money
Only truly powerful magical-thinking can create such a veil of blindness to the sorcery of Voldemort-money. To a typical Muggle, the following facets are so banal they hardly deserve further inquiry:
- Voldemort-money was designed to live forever and never to die.
- Voldemort-money perpetually weakens, and perpetually tries to grow.
- Voldemort-money seeks to grow at all costs, even if it means killing unicorns.
- Voldemort-money is created by the stroke of a wand.*
- Voldemort-money is not free, it was loaned into existence by its creator.
- Voldemort-money, as debt, always acts in service of its creator, seeking to attract more of itself to bring back in the form of interest (the fee for use).
- Voldemort-money naturally returns to where it is most abundant (1% keep 80% of what is created.)
- Voldemort-money puts people and planet to work for it. One can use it but will always owe more in the end.
- Voldemort-money is imbued with the magical power of pure potential. For those who have it, money can turn into anything. Therefore, it appears that anything can turn into money.
- Voldemort-money can grow at an exponential rate (so those who collect them get more, and those who need them owe ever more.)
- Voldemort-money is a near universal ‘medium’ of communication. Every corner of the planet is affected.
- Voldemort-money can easily enchant minds, bending them to its own will for self-replication.
- Voldemort-money is meaningless. It was created to create more of itself, not to represent meaningful contributions, relationships, or mutual goals.
Without a thought about how it came into existence, and only dreams of what it can become, an empty quality surrounds money, imbuing it with a false illusion of neutrality. Many Muggles tend to regard money as representing pure potential energy. But Voldemort-Money is far from neutral energy… the medium is the message.
Attached to our collective cache of cash is a nefarious and fragmented soul with the sole purpose of growing, tumor-like, far beyond the elegant beauty and flow of a natural carbon cycle. Voldemort-money is what you earn, save, and invest to grow.
Our debt-based monetary monopoly is what You Know Who would design to ensure absolute power and certain death and destruction, with his self-serving soul attached to each dollar. As a horcrux, Voldemort-money carries the ultimate power to enslave by being the sole means of meeting all Muggle needs and wants. Voldemort-money never dies, no matter how weak and pitiful it becomes. Unwilling to give up the ghost, or languish piteous and forgotten, each horcrux exists to grow exponentially by desecrating Nature and the most sacred, ancient beings on Earth. Voldemort-money bewitches and ensnares the life-force of the poor Muggle. Hypnotized and zombified, Muggles are forced to do the bidding of Voldemort’s parasitic horcruxes. In this way, Voldemort-money-magic feeds the worst in Muggle nature, while Muggles can hardly see how they are being extorted.
Voldemort-money is such a powerful force, that just to get more of it, Muggles are scraping the bottom of the ocean, cutting off the tops of mountains, burning down rainforests, and changing the Earth’s atmosphere. They are warring, enslaving, fawning over those who have managed to collect the most, and fighting each other to find someone to blame.
The ancient magic of Gold had once been the most brilliant enchantress. Many unicorns were slayed as Gold was ripped from the tender body of the Earth, stacked in new caves, and protected by armies, wreaking death and destruction across the seas.
Yet Gold was just a wicked wizard’s practice play compared to the power that is wielded with Voldemort-money, a truly monstrous thing.
The Magical Muggle Mind
Reliance on Voldemort-money, and gold before it, created and reinforced economic assumptions about the unavoidably destructive behavior of naturally self-interested people amidst planetary scarcity. So if history is the story of human behavior over time, it is incomplete without understanding how the history of monetary design has been a primary influence. Extractive systems incentivize extractive behaviors.
Systems are stories and stories matter. Money is the medium of communication and the medium is the message. Understanding the nefarious flaws of Voldemort-money can help unravel the story of who we are in order to reweave a new narrative, upheld by new economic webs of meaning.
Today, many Muggles are sensing a dark cloud of impending environmental and political doom. Fraught with fear and struggling with limited bandwidth, we rationalize and invoke unconscious biases that work like magical charms on our thinking to reconcile enslavement to the forces of our tainted Voldemort-money. Each individual Muggle struggles to resist, but ultimately is doing Voldemort’s bidding, fulfilling the singular purpose of making precious horcruxes grow and multiply.
“But, money is not the problem!” the Muggles proclaim. “The problem is the greed and evil of other Muggles who are waging war and killing unicorns.” This is why it is important to understand Voldemort-money. For far too long we have blamed each other and human nature for the destructive behaviors wreaking havoc upon the planet. The strategy of convincing others to behave differently is politics, and can only go so far.
If we want peace and harmony, we must understand the role of the monetary system, and feel empowered to change it. If we want to end climate change and invoke the power of regeneration, we must understand the power of the monetary system to undermine our efforts. If we want to experience prosperity in our communities and optimize the wellbeing of individuals, we must understand the power of the monetary system, and leverage that power to create new talismans and tokens of trust. Design is key and no design is neutral.
Richard Thaler, considered the father of behavioral economics, won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2017 for showing how systems are never neutral and will always nudge human behavior in one direction or another.
Unfortunately, so far behavioral economics has been more concerned with studying the unpredictability and irrationality of human behavior within the context of an unexamined economic system than with studying how various monetary systems can optimize human behavior. However, if we are to move toward harmonious and regenerative behaviors, we should certainly be looking at how monetary design can encourage them. Both through the study of history and evidence-based design, we can look at what impacts monetary systems have had on individual wellbeing, community prosperity, social peace and harmony, and ecological regeneration. From history we can look at Native American Wampum, the tally sticks of the Middle Ages, the Austrian Miracle of Wörgle, and scrip from the Colonial and Depression Eras. Designing and managing the common resource of a mutually beneficial and sustainable method of exchange has been proven to be a natural human response time and time again. In fact, this was the work of Elinor Ostrom, who in 2009 became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. Humans can and do manage common resources peacefully and sustainably. And money is also a common resource.
So if money is not neutral, can a better understanding of its flaws and features support a better understanding of how human behavior is being impacted and how we might improve them both?
Currently, our dominant monetary design does more than incentivize behaviors of greed, division, and punishing competition: it demands these behaviors to fulfill its purpose.
While Muggles blame and claw at each other and continue to grow their money, Voldemort’s evil influence goes unexamined. It is time to take a closer look at our money system and call it what it is.
Making Meaning is the Antidote to Meaningless Magic
If Muggles want the messages they pass between one another to communicate harmony, trust, flourishing peace, prosperity, and regeneration, it will take awareness and harnessing the power of story to infuse all we do with the kind of meaning that reflects the world we want.
Muggles don’t have time for cognitive dissonance and unquestioned assumptions about how money and economics work. And we don’t have time to petition those infected by the trance to hand over their horcruxes. (The politics of redistribution.)
But we can sequester our Voldemort-money, turning them into nutrients for meaningful and measurable investments (Economic Drawdown), and co-create new grassroots mediums of exchange (cultivating economic ecosystems).
Muggles are defined by their resistance to magic, but we don’t have to be. Awakening to the recognition that our own magical thinking holds some power is the first step to our liberation. For example, we create our own money as an I.O.U. This is the first step on a long journey of healing Economic Trauma. Liberation and co-creation happen through the power of shared story, of weaving new webs of meaning.
We don’t need horcruxes. We need meaningful lives and relationships. We can design money, and therefore the economy, to reflect that.
Activists, students, teachers, investors, businesses, and government leaders can all benefit from connecting the dots between peace, prosperity, regeneration, wellbeing, and currency design. How can we design the money agreements we use to be in service of what we want? How can we manage the existing currency resources we have with deep democracy and shared, meaningful equity? Together, we can weave new webs of monetary meaning, heal economic trauma, and cultivate regenerative economic ecosystems.
To learn about how, join us for a 12-week deep dive on Weaving Webs of Monetary Meaning. For more information, email: amalisa@peaceprofits.org
*It is popular for monetary critics (like Positive Money UK) to say “out of thin air.” I use “wand” here to make the same point, drawing an obvious parallel between the stroke of a keyboard and stroke of a wand. Of course, this “thin air” argument has its own critics, who say that money is backed by the future production of the borrower. This, of course must also be countered (and perhaps added above) with data showing that Counter-arguments
